A Street Divided: Stories From Jerusalem’s Alley of God Page 4

  So when Miriam’s dentures tumbled out a window and into No Man’s Land that day in May, it seemed like a lost cause. It was spring, and Miriam was sitting by a window overlooking the border. She accidentally coughed her dentures into a piece of paper and threw them out the window. The paper fell into the weeds and trash below. By the time Miriam realized she’d tossed her dentures into No Man’s Land, there was nothing she could do. Miriam was distraught. She refused to speak for days.14

  The nuns came up with an improbable solution: Why not ask Israel and Jordan to declare a cease-fire so the UN could send a search party into No Man’s Land to recover the dentures? In a rare moment of unity, both armies agreed to hold their fire so the UN could rescue the dentures.

  With Jordanian Legionnaires watching from the Old City walls on the other side of No Man’s Land, a French officer carrying a white flag led five nuns and an Israeli soldier into the rubble to hunt for the false teeth. It wasn’t an easy mission. The street between the hospital and the Old City was cluttered with boulders, trash, overgrown bushes, shrapnel and, quite possibly, unexploded mines from the 1948 war. Miriam kept watch on the search from the hospital windows above.

  “It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Rubinger, who took photos of the unusual rescue party.

  Dressed in their white habits with their distinctive Flying Nun–esque hooded cowls, the women picked through the detritus without any luck. As the minutes dragged on, the search seemed futile. Then one of the nuns spotted something in the grass, rummaged through the garbage and hoisted the dentures into the air. Smiling, Sister Augustine triumphantly showed the dentures to Miriam looking down from the window above as Rubinger snapped photos. When the pictures appeared in Life magazine, the French commander who led the search party complained that it made him look like a fool.

  “It is not fitting for a French commandant to be seen looking for false teeth,” the French officer told Rubinger.*

  The incident came to define the hospital and the small ways Israel and Jordan were able to find common ground, at least for some false teeth.

  “For humanitarian reasons, you can do a lot, even in a time of war,” said Sister Monika Duellmann, who took over as director of the French hospital in 2004. “It’s difficult to get a cease-fire that will hold, and they got one for the teeth—because it’s not political and it’s not religious.”

  Rubinger, arguably Israel’s most famous photojournalist, often sought out surreal stories along the jagged dividing line. The photographer went everywhere he could go. One place he always worried about entering was No Man’s Land.

  “It wasn’t very good for your health to go to No Man’s Land,” Rubinger said. “It was easier to get to the moon than it was to get across the border.”

  Seven months after the search for the dentures, Rubinger got a chance to get another look at No Man’s Land. In December 1956, faced with a growing wild dog problem in the city, Israel and Jordan agreed to join forces to lay out poisoned meat in No Man’s Land as part of a joint anti-rabies campaign. The dog problem was particularly bad in Jerusalem’s Abu Tor neighborhood. Abu Tor had been cut in two by the 1948 war. The top of the hillside neighborhood was inside Israel, but most of Abu Tor was part of Jordan. The two countries were separated by a skinny band that cut across a steep hillside of stone homes and small orchards.

  Led by a Scottish major with the UN and with an Israeli paratrooper keeping watch, Rubinger clicked away as Israeli and Jordanian veterinary workers tossed the deadly meat into the fields. Rubinger followed the team along the coils of barbed wire running between the homes and neglected terraced gardens. No Man’s Land seemed deserted, and bitter winter winds swept up the valley. The team walked along Barbed Wire Alley, a rocky path that would one day become Assael Street.

  “It felt like you were going somewhere nobody ever goes,” Rubinger said. “Like virgin territory.”

  While they were throwing out the meat, they heard something moving in the abandoned homes below. They watched warily as a Jordanian soldier came their way. He wore a long wool coat and a scarf that covered all but his eyes and nose. The soldier waved and made his way toward Rubinger and the anti-rabies team. In the chilly afternoon breeze, the Jordanian soldier walked up to a low stone wall in No Man’s Land and handed the Israeli paratrooper a glass of hot tea so he could warm himself up. Rubinger was amazed to see this small act of kindness between two soldiers from enemy nations.

  “That was unique,” he said. “Not just rare. Unique. The border between Israel and Jordan was such that nobody crossed alive.”

  A few months later, Rubinger drove to Qalqilya, a small village up north that was right on the Israel-Jordan border. The dividing line put the village in Jordan and its fields to the west in Israel. That created endless problems. The villagers had a hard time accepting that they lived in one country while their old farmlands were now in another. It was even harder to explain to their sheep, cows and donkeys, which gave little thought about new nations and wondered more about where they were going to get their next meal. It was a problem that dogged UN officials who complained that the borders made no sense.

  “Had the line been drawn to respect village boundaries, little trouble would have resulted,” said E. H. Hutchison, a commander in the US Navy who took over as chairman of the Jordan-Israel MAC in 1953. “The inhabitants of the villages so affected are not prepared to respect the invisible line or political decrees that are supposed to keep them from the lands they and their forbearers have owned and cultivated for hundreds of years.”15

  That day in 1957, Rubinger had been tipped off that a big international trial was going to be held in Qalqilya. When he arrived, Israeli and Jordanian officers were gathering on the border to decide the fate of a cow.

  “They had a court sitting on the road, in the middle of the road, that had to decide whom the cow belonged to,” said Rubinger, who was so captivated by the unfolding legal battle that he shot three rolls of film.

  The uniformed Jordanian and Israeli officials set up three folding metal tables on the road in No Man’s Land between large metal anti-tank barricades shaped like big toy jacks. The aggrieved Arab farmers, wearing long formless thobes and white flowing kaffiyehs held on the head by a double knot of black cord, met on the road to plead their case. Jordanian and Israeli soldiers milled around as the men argued over whose cows were whose. The cows in question were led before the judges for examination. The court issued its decree. Decades later, Rubinger couldn’t remember just how it played out. And nothing was left in his photo archives to jog his memory.

  Cooling Off in No Man’s Land

  Livestock disputes weren’t all that unusual at the time. UN records from that era are filled with files upon files about stolen mules, missing cows and “imposter” sheep. Diplomats assigned to Jerusalem routinely found themselves mediating feuds over livestock. Journalists in Jerusalem could only take them so seriously. “Jordan Yields Wrong Sheep,” read one headline on a short story in the February 11, 1958, edition of the Jerusalem Post.

  “Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem became a sheepfold yesterday morning when the Jordanian authorities herded 30 sheep into no-man’s-land for return to Israel,” the reporter wrote. The sheep were finding their way back through Mandelbaum Gate, the central link between Jordanian-controlled East Jerusalem and Israeli-controlled West Jerusalem.16

  The handover seemed to be going along well, until the Israelis inspecting the returnees discovered that most of the sheep weren’t theirs. They were, the article reported, “imposters.” The sheep were turned back by Israel to Jordanian officials who vowed to track down the real sheep.17

  Crossing the border was impossible for most people. Mandelbaum Gate was used mostly by UN officials, diplomats, merchants and few others. Little about it was inviting. The 50-yard crossing was dominated by the remnants of a two-story stone home owned by a Jewish
immigrant named Simcha Mandelbaum. The only piece of the house to survive the 1948 war was part of a wall with an elegant stone arch that rose above a No Man’s Land cluttered with rusting armored personnel carriers, coils of barbed wire and lines of conical, concrete anti-tank barriers known as Dragon’s Teeth.

  At Christmas, busloads of Christians on the Israeli side were allowed through the gate into Jordan so they could visit the biblical birthplace of Jesus in Bethlehem, just down the road from Jerusalem. Occasionally, Israel and Jordan used the gate to hand over mischievous boys caught exploring No Man’s Land.

  The No Man’s Land at Mandelbaum Gate served as an unusual backdrop for engagements and weddings between brides living on one side of the border and grooms living on the other. Israel and Jordan agreed to hold their fire so some couples, separated by the border, could get engaged amid the tangles of barbed wire and Dragon’s Teeth.18 They looked on as the families raised toasts to newlyweds married in No Man’s Land.19

  In 1958, Raphael Israeli, then a 24-year-old Israeli army captain, was chosen to be a delegate on the Jordan-Israel MAC. His youth and inexperience meant that Israeli came to the job with distinct disadvantages, so the ambitious Israeli officer did all he could to even the scales. Israeli, who was born in Morocco and left when he was 14, used his knowledge of Arabic to establish a decent rapport with the Jordanian delegation led by Col. Mohammad Daoud Al-Abbasi, a deft debater who would go on to become his country’s prime minister. The two officers got so close that Abbasi, nearly 20 years older than Israeli, quietly gave his Israeli counterpart a present at the UN commission office in No Man’s Land when one of Israeli’s kids was born.

  “Don’t tell anybody,” Abbasi told Israeli as he handed him the gift, “because if anybody knows I brought a present to a Jew, to a Zionist, they will hang me.”

  One of the biggest tests for the two came in 1962 when Israeli got an urgent call in the middle of the night telling him to get dressed and come to the UN office in No Man’s Land right away to meet Abbasi.

  “What’s happened?” Israeli asked, fearing the worst.

  “Just come,” the UN official told Israeli.

  When Israeli got there, Abbasi was in a panic.

  “Rafi,” the Jordanian officer said, “you have to help me. We have a problem.”

  The crisis wasn’t over a deadly shooting or a child missing in No Man’s Land. It was over a runaway horse. And not just any horse. This one belonged to the head of Silwan, the crowded Arab village outside the Old City that rose on the hillside across the valley from Abu Tor. The man’s horse had run across the valley, up the Abu Tor hillside, past the barbed wire and into Israel, where it was set to be placed under quarantine for 40 days.

  In this case, with this horse, that wasn’t going to work. The horse’s owner called Abbasi and told him in no uncertain terms to bring his horse back without delay.

  “You have to help me,” Abbasi told Israeli. “The entire village expects me to bring it back. All my honor and respect hangs on this. Please help me get it back quickly.”

  Israeli was happy to help—so long as he could use the crisis to Israel’s advantage. Israeli wanted to use the handover to take a swipe at the United Nations. He suggested that Israel give Abbasi the horse the next day at the UN headquarters on a ridge next to Abu Tor, not at Mandelbaum Gate. Abbasi blanched at the idea, but Israeli persuaded him to go along with the plan. Israeli called the general in command at the UN Government House and told him about the agreement. The general, Israeli said, rejected the idea out of concern it would damage the UN gardens. “OK,” Israeli told the United Nations, “I’ll call some reporters and tell them that the UN is blocking a deal between Israel and Jordan.”

  The handoff took place the next day at the UN headquarters.

  Horses, sheep, cattle and dogs weren’t the only ones to venture into No Man’s Land. Adventurous kids would sometimes sneak through the fence to rescue playground balls. Soldiers from one side or the other would risk being shot to gather eggs, vegetables or fruit in No Man’s Land. And young men on the hunt for a daring adventure also tested border security. One night sometime in the early 1950s, while Rubinger was drinking with friends at a neighborhood bar—Fink’s—in West Jerusalem, two guys came in waving a pair of movie tickets from a cinema in the Old City, across the No Man’s Land, in Jordan. How they got into East Jerusalem, they didn’t say.

  “It was a suicidal thing to do,” Rubinger said.

  The failure of Israel and Jordan to eliminate No Man’s Land paved the way for it to become the setting for surreal moments that trumped cow courts and sheep counts. One man claimed he was the Messiah and wandered babbling into No Man’s Land near the Old City. Another guy made local news when he stormed out of his house during an argument with his wife and marched straight into No Man’s Land before he did something he might regret.

  “Husband Cools Off in No Man’s Land,” read the headline of a tiny August 16, 1959, Jerusalem Post article about the domestic fight that became an international dispute.20

  A 27-year-old resident of Jerusalem’s Musrara quarter, Avraham Abu-Gzar, got into a quarrel with his wife yesterday afternoon and, after beating her, announced his intention of crossing the border into Jordan. He actually went into No Man’s Land and disappeared among the empty houses.

  Police were called and asked to contact the U.N., and Jordanian authorities . . . but, wise in the ways of quarreling husbands, [they] advised everybody to sit tight for awhile. Sure enough, at 4:15 p.m.—three quarters of an hour after Abu-Gzar had disappeared—he reappeared, having decided not to cross into Jordan after all. Police detained him and released him on . . . bond.

  The beating appeared to be part of a turbulent train wreck of a marriage. The short story only hinted at its troubles: a violent husband; a wife who was living with another man in another city; and three children looking for a stable home.

  “They will decide today if and how to charge the contrite husband,” the reporter wrote. “Two years ago, Mrs. Abu-Gzar left her husband to live in Haifa with another man. She came to Jerusalem on Friday to see her husband before a Rabbinate Court this week which is to decide on the custody of their three children.”

  Jordan to Israel: Stop the Toilet

  Perhaps the most absurd fight over No Man’s Land took place at Eliyahu Goeli’s hillside home in Abu Tor.

  Living in the cross fire, the Goelis settled into an unusual routine. They would creep through the barbed wire and into No Man’s Land to recover eggs laid by their chickens. Sometimes they had to scramble after the chickens themselves. They waved to friendly Jordanian soldiers, who kept constant watch from a rooftop below. They rushed across open ground on the hilltop to avoid being targeted by malicious border guards. The family learned to tell the difference between the snap of rifle rounds over their heads and the echoes of machine gun fire across the valley.

  The Goelis’ home was part of a small compound owned by Jerusalem’s Greek Orthodox Church. There was a small monastery on the other side of the property from the Goelis and a few other homes tucked under the trees. After Eliyahu staked his claim, others moved in.

  In February 1966, the Goelis and their neighbors decided they needed to repair their outhouse. The bathroom was in serious disrepair. So they brought in some concrete blocks and started rebuilding, oblivious to the outrage boiling on the Jordanian side.

  On February 10, Jordanian officials fired off an urgent demand that the United Nations immediately step in and bring the construction in No Man’s Land to a halt. The next day, when Jordanian officials learned the Israelis were still building, Abbasi, then head of the Jordanian military team in Jerusalem, sent a charged warning to the United Nations: “If you don’t stop the construction, we will.”

  “Col. Daoud said that if we didn’t take measures to get the work stopped, he would find the way of stopping it himsel
f,” a UN official told his superiors.21

  But it didn’t stop. The workers kept coming. On the third day, the Jordanians fired off a more threatening complaint.

  “To keep the peace in Jerusalem, we request immediate stoppage of the work being done until the case is discussed by the MAC,” the Jordanian delegation demanded.22

  UN investigators converged on Abu Tor to investigate the latest border dispute. They secretly snapped photographs that captured blurred images of young men working on the outhouse. They interviewed people building the toilet. They measured the size of the outhouse and the thickness of its concrete blocks. The dispute dragged on for weeks. Jordanian officials accused Israel of using the toilet as a pretext for covertly building a new military post in No Man’s Land. Israelis mocked the Jordanians for being so worked up over a tiny five-foot by eight-foot toilet.

  On March 8, the Israeli and Jordanian delegations met at the MAC offices for a second time to argue over the home improvement project. The two sides agreed that the house was in No Man’s Land. They didn’t see eye-to-eye on the toilet itself. In 1951, Israel and Jordan had reached an agreement under which a few people already living in No Man’s Land—people like the Goelis—would be allowed to stay. Israel and Jordan selected a few dozen homes in No Man’s Land they wanted to protect and agreed to provide power and services to a few on each side. The deal tacitly ceded parts of No Man’s Land to one nation or the other. Israel and Jordan agreed that people living in the homes should be allowed to live a “normal life.” In this case, the two countries couldn’t agree on what that meant. Exasperated UN officials tried to mediate. Israelis thought it was absurd to think that repairing the bathroom would be forbidden.